Owen Gleiberman

Thanksgiving follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have.

It’s clear the filmmaker has never lost that besotted hero worship. The Stones and Brian Jones digs deep into the Jones mystique, trying to make the case for him as a misunderstood “genius.”

The director, Nia DaCosta (who made the intriguing remake of “Candyman”), stages the action efficiently, but she doesn’t center the narrative; the film is a series of goals in search of a higher mission.

The movie is being marketed as a “psychological” thriller, but psychology is what it doesn’t have. It’s more like “Cape Fear” reduced to a “Predator” sequel.

For a first movie, Old Dads shows promise. Bill Burr is onto something about how the new culture of control messes with the heads of ordinary people. Next time, though, he should channel the rage instead of flaunting it.

The Exorcist: Believer, in its superficially competent and poshly mounted way, feels about as dangerous as a crucifix dipped in a bottle of designer water.

Reptile comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.

Foe wants to end with a big “Whoa.” Instead, it leaves us going “Huh, interesting” and “Whuuut?” at the same time.

"The Caine Mutiny,” for all the tinkering, remains a warhorse of a play. And that’s both a good and a limited thing. The way Friedkin has directed it, it certainly plays.

The torture set pieces in the “Saw” films are lavish gifts of baroque horror presented to the audience. They are, quite simply, the reason we came. Tobin Bell, with his stare of pitiless wisdom, is also a draw, but “Saw X” raises the issue of how much of John Kramer’s hand-wringing is too much. In the eyes of a lot of “Saw” fans, hand-wringing < hands cut off with mechanized garden shears.

I take no vicious pleasure in saying that Poolman, a movie that Pine co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is not only the worst film I saw during the fall festival season but would likely be one of the worst films in any year it came out.

What’s strange about Together 99 is that it looks like a Lukas Moodysson film (natural light), it moves like a Lukas Moodysson film (the documentary-like flow), but it’s blanketed with a sodden forlorn Swedish bourgeois cynicism that makes you think Moodysson needs to get out more.

This is true 21st-century trash: a movie in which the action itself is expendable.

Throughout the film, he’s so calmly but blazingly articulate, so candid about the processes of moviemaking and his strengths (and weaknesses) as an actor, so wise about the meaning of his own stardom, that I realized, with a touch of embarrassment, a prejudice I’ve been carrying around for 47 years. Deep in my reptile brain, I still think Sylvester Stallone is Rocky.

It’s a highly entertaining movie that manages to pack in more or less every important thing you’d want to know about Tom Wolfe.

Knox Goes Away doesn’t traffic in comedy — or exaggerated reality. In addition to being a noir that holds you exactly the way a noir should, it may be one of the best dramas about dementia I’ve ever seen.

[A] smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama.

It’s not a comedy, but as you watch it you can almost see Woody Allen standing off to the side, chuckling at the human folly he’s showing you.

Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.

The daring thing Coppola does, given that we’re used to seeing even sophisticated biopics weave the lives they’re showing us into dramatic arcs, is to present the rise and fall of Priscilla and Elvis’s relationship as a diary, one that simply flows forward in a kind of objective Zen fashion, never trumping anything up.

In The Killer, David Fincher is hooked on his own obsession with technique, his mystique of filmmaking-as-virtuoso-procedure. It’s not that he’s anything less than great at it, but he may think there’s more shading, more revelation in how he has staged The Killer than there actually is.

Maestro can’t help but be dominated by the grandeur of Bernstein’s passion, his outsize flaws, and the tightrope he walked between the need to find the meaning of beauty and the desire to stay fancy free. Yet Cooper and Mulligan make the movie a duet to remember.

The specter of death haunts the racing scenes in “Ferrari.” That’s part of their intoxicating charge. But it isn’t just the action that’s fraught with thrilling danger. Every moment of the drama moves with a sense of high-stakes dread, of underlying emotional turbulence.

If the characters, apart from Salvatore, had been more developed, there might be more drama to it, but Comandante, in its honorable and slightly gloomy way, has been conceived as the delivery system for a humanitarian message.

The film’s 90 minutes whiz by.

Maridueña, playing Hollywood’s first Latino superhero, proves an appealing star. And the novelty of casting a comic-book blockbuster with a mostly unknown crew of vibrant Latino actors finds its emotional grounding in Jaime’s family.

What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.

That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.